We were greeted off the plane by the wonderfully hospitable Harriet Cronk (we are so lucky to know so many wonderfully hospitable people) who swept us back to the Cronk's (old family friends, and current employers) beautiful house where we ate (ahhhh Pizza and beer, so un-French and so delicious) and crashed into bed. Paris is exhausting.

The next day (after a sumptuous breakfast) we boarded a train for somewhere called Thorpe-le-Soken. This is where our employer, Paul Cronk, is currently in the final stages of constructing a health spa called Lifehouse. Little did we know, Thorpe is not somewhere, it is nowhere. But more about that later. Paul greeted us off the train and introduced us to a million future coworkers and shower us briefly around the site (though all the interesting bits were off limits under construction). The spa is set to open late November so we are here for the hectic and frantic culmination of Ten Years of work. The spa is set on the site of Thorpe Hall, and is surrounded by beautiful garden's designed by a very enthusiastic gardener and former Lady of the manor Lady Byng. The gardens are sprawled around the spa buildings (which are by the way, ultra-modern, black and white, very cool, and blend bizarrely with the surrounding red brick that remains of the manor). The red brick is also ubiquitous without the gardens, which are a combination of rigidly geometric Victorian rose gardens and 1920's "wild gardens." The whole thing was masterminded by this Lady Byng who, it turns out, was obsessed with Californian botany. So there we were, in a seaside town in deepest Essex, surrounded by madrones, eucalyptus, and other incredibly familiar plants that made us feel, if not at home, then at least a bit more comfortable. The garden's have been beautifully restored and include many paths, various lakes and ponds, and many massive exotic trees.

The project has million of employee's and is utter chaos as everyone is working hard to open in less than a month. But the atmosphere is congenial and at times almost festive and there is a definite sense of frantic teamwork. We are here at the right time. Although, unfortunately, the wrong time of the week. Before we had barely begun to work, it was the weekend, so we settled into the Bell, a pub with a couple extremely cozy rooms above, and set out to get to know Thorpe.